The Blood Beast Terror

Myth Conception

The Blood Beast Terror
Directed by Vernon Sewell
Tigon UK 1968 
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers fluttering into view.

What do you call a female moth?
A myth!
Old pearl of wisdom much admired by the blog author

I have to confess that, even though I’d been pre-warned somewhat as to the general reputation of The Blood Beast Terror, I was expecting it to be a little more engaging than it actually is. This is not to say I didn’t have a little fun with it but, yeah, it’s no surprise now that I just discovered that it’s the film of his that Peter Cushing disliked the most and, it has to be said, as brilliant as he always is, he isn’t really able to save the picture here.

This one is about a ‘mad lepidopterist’ who... and it really doesn’t take the audience long to figure this out... has created a half human/half Death’s Head moth lady, who he says is his daughter (and may well be), as played by Wanda Ventham (who was also in UFO, reviewed here and is the mother of a certain Benedict Cumberbatch). She goes around indiscriminately changing into a big moth, killing various men and draining them of their blood while the lepidopterist Dr. Mallinger, played by Robert Flemyng, is trying to double down on his dubious success by creating her a mate. Just how that is supposed to stop the mass of blood drained victims is anybody’s guess but, yeah, the film doesn’t really cling fervently to the idea of story logic, that’s for sure. 

Luckily for the British public at large, we have Detective Inspector Quennell on the case, played by the great Peter Cushing, messing around with props and finger-raising his way into a solution which brings the truth out. Aiding him is Sergeant Allan, played by the always watchable Glynn Edwards and, also, Quennell's daughter, played by Vanessa Howard. And, of all people, the local  morgue attendant is played by Roy Hudd, bringing the wide eyed comedy relief in a couple of turns which, it transpires, were mostly improvised by himself (which adds fuel to the fire about the state of the screenplay on this one, I might suggest). 

The film looks okay (and is presented in a nice print and transfer from 88 Films) and the director seems to be taking the old Roger Corman trick of leaving doors open on sets to heart because, the various rooms (I suspect most of them aren’t sets at all, instead re-dressed locations) are full of open doors the actors can walk through to give them something to do. Which does indeed, at least give the scenes a sense of depth, which is why Corman used to do it, I believe. 

As far as the main antagonist goes... poor old Wanda. At first I thought she was a were-moth because much is made of the moon being full at one point but, no, she can apparently just flit about and change at will, no matter what the time of day... and the transition effects amount to a bad and very quick dissolve (almost to the point where it’s pretty much a jump cut), from her to the creature. And, honestly, the moth costume is not good. If you think of the Menoptera from the Doctor Who story The Web Planet from three years before this (and reviewed by me here) well, it's a notch below that and it fully feels like the producers just went around to their local fancy dress costume shop. Not a good look. 

And the clues to the solution of these mothical crimes, such as they are, are obvious and infantile to everyone except, for a time, the police investigating the murders.

There was, however, one good moment... a wonderful transition where a character says “I think we’re due a thunderstorm.” This then cuts to someone wobbling a big sheet of metal to give the thunder effect for a play being put on at the lepidopterist’s house. The play itself seems a mash up of the Frankenstein story with Burke and Hare (the subject of the director’s last film, three years from the release of this one, which I reviewed here) and, although it was a good transition, this play within a film goes on way too long for what it is and, yeah, we could really have done without it. At least this much of it, I feel. 

I should probably mention another dubious highlight of the film before I give my final thoughts... and its the ridiculous ending. Now, you may not believe this but the film ends when the two detectives rescue a man from Mad Moth Wanda (as I will now, forever, call her) when she’s trying to claim another victim. She flies off, making an easy getaway but, in a stroke of questionable genius, Cushing quickly lights a nearby bonfire and, attracted to the light... I’m not making this up... she flies into the fire and burns to death. I mean, this film gets a big thumbs up from me for having a totally ludicrous ending, at least. This is about as silly as could be hoped for, it has to be said. This is Golden Raspberry Award worthy stuff, for sure. 

The big problem with this film, for me, is that it’s a nice concept. I mean, how can you screw up... or at least dull down... a film about a blood lusting killer moth woman? But, alas, as I was watching I just kept thinking how much better the film would have been if someone at Hammer, or even Amicus, had the project to bring to the screen. Cushing is good in this, as always but, like I said, he’s not able to elevate the picture sufficiently to lift it out of the doldrums. Which is a shame because I really wanted to like The Blood Beast Terror, especially since it was released into UK cinemas in the same month I was born. But there you go... not much more to say. I would certainly watch this again because, there is a certain amount of fun to be had for sure but, it’s not a title I would recommend even to lovers of this period of British horror, truth be told. 

Ahsoka

Gesundheit!

Ahsoka
Streaming August - October 2023
8 episodes

Warning: Spoilers within.

Okay, so of the messed up Star Wars TV shows that Disney has so far put out (and I’ve still not seen them all quite yet), Ahsoka is probably the best and most consistently entertaining one. Now, there’s a lot going on here which I don’t pretend to understand fully because, one thing I’ve not seen is any of the Star Wars animated TV shows (apart from the cartoon feature film which got released theatrically in the UK and I can’t remember much about it). That being said, there are a lot of flashback references to what one assumes are the important parts needed here, just remade into live action variants so... yeah, I think you can mostly get through this without having sampled the animated fayre, to be honest (and I’ve no real desire to finally catch up to the Droids or Ewoks TV shows, which I guess would have to be the first port of call if I was to do it properly). 

This one follows the complicated exploits of Ahsoka, Sabine Wren (a kind of Mandalorian Jedi-in-Training, played by Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Hera Syndulla (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, no stranger to the fantasy and science fiction genres, for sure). 

Now, apart from wanting to see this before the new Star Wars movie is out soon (or possibly at time of publication of this blog review) the other big draw is, like the appearance by Ahsoka in the ‘almost pretty good’ series The Book Of Boba Fett (reviewed here) and The Mandalorian (reviewed here), the title character is played once again by one of my favourite modern actresses, Rosario Dawson. Now, admittedly it’s hard to see the Rosario for the Lekku here but, well, make up and prosthetics (and CGI) aside, it’s another role which shows the range and diversity of the actress. 

The story is basically a side quest to find an old friend of these characters, Ezra, but in the process, endangering the future of the ‘Empireless’ Star Wars universe by risking the return, as a side effect (or vice versa, actually), of a rather famous bad guy from the Star Wars novels who I had no idea had made it into any of the various TV shows over the years. Now I’ve only ever read, maybe less than 20 Star Wars novels in my life but, one of the three trilogies I read was Timothy Zahn’s sequence of novels which were, when they were being marketed in the early 1990s, being touted as the official sequel to the original Star Wars trilogy of films. And the bad guy in that series, being chased by Luke Skywalker and co, was Grand Admiral Thrawn... who returns, after a stint in some cartoons, in this show. I guess it’s a case of Thrawn but not forgotten. 

Story beats and mechanics aside, it’s a nicely put together show with good chemistry between all the many characters (including David Tennant voicing Ahsoka’s droid Huyang) and some nice cameos by the likes of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker (who somehow found time to train Ahsoka when he was in the land of the living, before he became Darth Vader) and C3PO. 

I have a few minor complaints about the show but the only one I’ll highlight is my disappointment with the text recap on the first episode. For some reason, the producers have decided to veer away from the one point perspective style scrolling text adopted by the original Star Wars movies and which were an obvious reference to the recaps on some of the 1930s and 1940s Universal theatrical serials, specifically the third and final Flash Gordon serial, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here). That being said, the vision Ahsoka finds herself in during episode five certainly reminded me a little of the aesthetic of the light bridges used in Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (reviewed here). 

But there were also some really nice things in the show too. Two I’ll highlight are...

The use of violins or, in this case, ‘fiddles’ in the last episode to highlight the antics of four witches... honouring the time old tradition of iterating this kind of orchestration to accompany witches throughout the history of cinema. Indeed, I’d have to say that the scoring on Ahsoka by somebody called Kevin Kiner is much more in keeping with John Williams and George Lucas’ vision of using the kind of writing style of the golden age of Hollywood than any of the other Star Wars shows so far. 

Okay, the other thing is going to throw people who don’t know the rich history of the character but, there’s a ‘blast shield’ Jedi training scene and, yes, I get it, it’s a reference back to the original film (called Star Wars on its first release) when Luke is training in the Millennium Falcon... but it’s, oh, so much more than that and also comments on the title character’s fighting style throughout the series too. 

To explain... at one point during Wren’s training, Ahsoka asks her droid if he’s tried her in the Zatoichi style. As soon as she said that, I knew she was going to stick a helmet on the pupil, effectively blinding her (and there’s more, give me a minute)... 

So Zatoichi is a long running series of films, initially starring Shintaru Katsu, who played the blind samurai (and greatest swordsman in all of Japan) in 26 movies made between 1962 and 1989, not to mention in a hundred TV episodes in the 1970s and, after Katsu, at least three other Zatoichi films have been made to date (you can read my review of the first Zatoichi film here, with more to follow as I will be returning to that series of films shortly). I’m sure he’ll be back before too long as he gets rebooted for yet another generation. He had a sword cane and, if you want to see what looks like pretty much an exact replica of that sword cane, it’s in this show as the weapons Ahsoka gives herself and Wren to train with in that particular scene. The Zatoichi fighting style with the backwards sweep of the blade is also something which Ahsoka seems to adopt for the show. So I was really pleased with this. 

Of course, this is not the first time Zatoichi has been used in the modern Star Wars franchise. Donnie Yen’s character Chirrut Îmwe in Rogue One was literally a version of Zatoichi himself dropped, into that story and it of course prompted many people on social media at the time to ask why Yen hadn’t officially played Zatoichi in a film. The time will come, is my guess. He’s already played yet another blind killer heavily based on Zatoichi in John Wick 4 (and its soon-to-be spin off, Cane). 

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, that single stroke victory after a Mexican standoff against a light sabre wielding droid is, I believe, a reference to the influential last scene in the Yojimbo sequel Sanjuro (reviews of both those Kurosawa films coming soon to the blog)... so that was another nice touch. 

The series ends on a kind of cliff hanger and I’m seeing the second season is due this year... so yeah, I probably will give that one a go too, as a voluntary thing because I thought this first season of Ahsoka was easily the best of those Star Wars shows I’ve seen so far and, well, there was never a dull minute. I’m now glad I reluctantly gave this one a chance. Maybe I should give Andor a quick look next?

The Enforcer

Tyne To Die

The Enforcer
Directed by James Fargo
USA 1976
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay... more spoilers. 

The Enforcer... not to be confused with either the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name and, nor indeed, the many films which came after this with the exact same title... is the third of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan movies. It’s also easily my favourite one, mainly because his leading co-star in this is just so good and adds a whole other dynamic to the character. 

The film opens with a pre-credits sequence this time around, before going onto the clichéd San Francisco skyline kind of shots you usually get on films of this ilk. Here we see a bunch of ‘terrorists’ (but not really, they’re just in it for the money), who are the main villains of the piece, take out two gas board officials and steal their truck to use for a scene later in the movie. We then, post credits, go into a couple of incidents with Eastwood’s Harry Callahan during his daily patrol, one of which he gets demoted to personnel for, for a few days, before being drafted back into homicide. It’s in personnel that he learns that the mayor is trying to encourage women police officers and he meets and tries to rattle a young female officer who is trying to become an inspector.

When he gets brought back to homicide again, after his partner gets killed investigating a robbery in progress while Harry was cooling his heels in personnel, he finds that the same female officer is his new partner. And this is the movie’s trump card because it manages to deal with inherent sexism in the police force in a positive way... not that we’d had any reason to suspect that Callahan was in any way sexist from the previous movies... but it also gives Clint Eastwood the best co-star he’s ever had (with probably some of the best chemistry too)... 

None other than the, then relatively unknown, Tyne Daly... the great Tyne Daly... plays his new partner Inspector Kate Moore and, boy, does she make an impression in this movie. She does an absolutely fantastic job here as a newcomer to homicide trying to deal with stuff like an autopsy and Harry’s chilly reception but, not only that, she does a great job almost stealing the limelight from Eastwood and credibly working with the actor too, in relatively few scenes (it’s a fairly short movie in the series). We see them create a working relationship which blossoms into a partnership of mutual respect and friendship. So much so that, when she saves Harry’s life for the second time in the movie, during the climactic stalk, chase and shoot finale, she dies from taking a few bullets intended for Harry... and the audience really feels it. Along with Harry of course, who literally blows the body of her killer to bits in the next scene.

So yeah, that unique partnership of Eastwood and Daly, never repeated as far as I can remember, absolutely makes this movie the best of the Dirty Harry films in my book. Once again, Harry has a different catchphrase... this one a sarcastic ‘Marvellous’ every time Inspector Moore does or says something questionable. But, Moore is also given her own catchphrase in this, “Don’t concern yourself Inspector Callahan” which she paraphrases with her last words at the end of the picture.  Now in the previous picture in the series, Magnum Force (reviewed by me here), David Soul was spotted and given the role of Hutch in the hugely successful TV show Starsky And Hutch. Similarly, Tyne Daly does such a good job in this movie it finally led to her hugely successful TV show, as Mary Beth Lacey in Cagney And Lacey, five years later. I like to think of Inspector Moore as a younger, more loose spirited version of Daly’s future signature role. 

Once again, the film is nicely lensed and has some good, creative shot design. One nice touch, for example, is when Harry leaves the hospital room, where his former partner is dying, to go out into the lobby to talk to his boss. As that set of information is conveyed with a conversation between the two men, more information is beings simultaneously given via the big intensive care observation window between the two characters, as we watch Harry’s partner die in the background through the window. 

The music in this one is pretty great too. This is the only Dirty Harry film which doesn’t have a score by composer Lalo Schifrin. I don’t know why but the producers enlisted the help of veteran composer Jerry Fielding instead and, it has to be said, he does an excellent job of keeping the tone of the movies set up by Schifrin. It doesn’t veer too far, I reckon, to the kind of score Schifrin would have provided with the assignment and I’m sure Fielding was probably asked to keep to the same kind of sound scape with his music. It was really nice when, starting in 2004, Donna Schifrin founded record label Aleph primarily to release and showcase her husband’s scores... the Dirty Harry soundtracks finally became commercially available on CD and, even though Schifrin didn’t compose the third, they were nice enough to release Fielding’s score for The Enforcer. So I guess they must have liked it too and it’s a nice thing to do for the fans of this series of movies.

And that’s me done on this third entry in the franchise. The film ends grimly with Harry standing over the corpse of his new partner on Alcatraz island while a helicopter lands to pay the ransom to the kidnappers that Harry has just wiped out. The Enforcer was intended to be the final Dirty Harry film but, seven years later, after a string of box office flops for the actor, he was persuaded to play Harry again. So I’ll be revisiting that one again soon. 

The Mandalorian Season 3

Boba Head Blues

The Mandalorian Season 3
Streaming March - April 2023
8 episodes

Okay, so I’m grudgingly watching the third series of The Mandalorian now because I feel like I should go and see the first new Star Wars movie we’ve had in cinemas for a while, in a couple of weeks. According to a work colleague, I also have to try and watch the woman who sounds like a sneeze series too, before I can fully appreciate the new film. So... yeah, I’ll need to try and catch up to that one too but I’m feeling less than optimistic. And I’m warning you right up front here... this is going to be a fairly short review. 

So, all in all, I thought this third season of the show was somewhat better than the last two, despite the fact that my favourite character hasn’t returned because the overly sensitive people at the nameless channel who are producing this show managed to cancel the actress who was the best thing about the show. But I’m not going in to all that rubbish here.
 
Now, maybe it’s because they’ve lost the 1950s-1970s TV western vibe they nicely had going for it in the previous two series and instead replaced it with an overriding story arc, is why I responded to this one more. Specifically to do with the character played by Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck in the modern reboot of Battlestar Galactica) and that kinda held my interest... it’s a way of keeping a few standalone stories in as side mission quests while constantly referring to the overall arc... a bit similar to the way The X Files finally wrecked themselves, when that overreaching arc needed resolving and outstayed its welcome. 

We have The Mandalorian played, as far as I know, by Pedro Pascal and his Lone Wolf And Cub-style sidekick Grogu, played by a bunch of pixels. I say as far as I know because, as is ‘the way’, Pascal never once shows his face in this series at all and two other actors also play the main character. So... I’m guessing that Pascal only provides the voice here but, I may be wrong.

And it’s entertaining enough, I guess. 

There are a few fair bad things about the show... like the longest and most interesting episode about the sabotaged reintegration of a former imperial clone specialist seeming to have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story other than a quick, plug in reference. Thus rendering it a pointless episode with no real punchline other than some clones, which you really already suspected were out there, being introduced literally as a throwaway moment in the last episode, which was already referred to enough in another episode. So... yeah, the most interesting bit of Star Wars in a while got kinda derailed before it had even got a chance to properly shine. 

Another episode starring Jack Black, musical artist Lizzo and Christopher Lloyd, is kind of like an adrenalised version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial but, rather than stay with that concept, just includes too much action and not enough of the main protagonists tying themselves in knots trying to get past the bureaucratic web. So, yeah. I definitely had some issues... not to mention that Grogu kind of plays a secondary role in these episodes. I wanted to see more of him in action than I was getting in this third series. 

But, for the sake of not being completely negative about the way a certain company has bought and managed to completely neutralise anything that was good about the Star Wars brand... there are a few nice things I’d like to shout out about here. 

So we had the mouse robot from the Death Star using the same sound sample, making yet another appearance here (plus it’s brought some friends). And we also had R5D4 from the original Star Wars movie (later renamed Episode IV - A New Hope for the various 1978 and 1979 re-releases) playing a major role as The Mandalorian’s new droid. I still have my old 1978 action figure of this droid up in my loft and they haven’t changed much about the character (it maybe looks slightly less beat up). 

The other nice thing was Mando (to his friends) working his way through a set of delayed opening shield doors and taking out various troopers as he goes. It was done in a slightly different manner but it was a nice nod to the best of the prequel movies, The Phantom Menace... and it allowed for the same sense of frustrated anticipation in the characters watching from the opposite side of the various shield doors. So that was good stuff. 

And, yeah, sorry but that’s me done for this season. I’m kinda hoping both characters meet their final fates in the new movie (death or whatever), selfishly so I don’t have to sit through another season of this show. The House Of Mouse definitely need to calm their Star Wars output down and desist from watering down the franchise anymore, I feel. Just release a new movie every three to ten years may be a better way of continuing the brand. At least that’s how I’d deal with what they’ve done to it. But, hey, I’m sure they’re making more short term money just milking it dry for now so, yeah, you can tell I’m not that optimistic about the Star Wars franchise these days. This is the way.

Dementia

Good Intense-ions

Dementia
USA 1955 (possibly earlier)
Directed by John Parker
(or possibly Bruno VeSota)
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Well now. Dementia is a strange film and reminds me of something I wrote myself when I was a teenager (which I tried to get shot three times and when it was finally shot and halfway through the edit, the videocassette tape was physically lost, quite literally fallen off the roof of a car... so a story fated never to be told). 

Anyway, my woes aside, Dementia was not released when it was made because it was, from what I understand, scaring people and was just too surreal for the perceived public consumption. It was continually denied certification in the US and banned for a while in the UK as well, until a few screeings in the 1970s. I believe an interracial dance scene at a jazz club was also something censors were keen to deny people the right to see (with the legendary Shorty Rogers playing jazz in the sequence).  

So, a black and white, surreal and noirish thriller with, I should add, no dialogue. There was another version a few years later, a bastardised version with cut footage (taking account that this original version is already only 56 minutes long), with a different score and added voice over dialogue, called Daughter Of Horror. This cut is also on the BFI Blu Ray but, out of respect for the original, uncompromised version, I have only watched the original, dialogue free version with a score by George Antheil... I might circle back to the other version at some later point because, at one time, it was better known and perhaps the memory of that led to this version being rediscovered. It’s the Daughter Of Horror version which is being watched by a bunch of teenagers in the original 1958 version of The Blob.

Adding to all the confusion, director John Parker is said to have ‘disappeared’ shortly after... or perhaps he never existed in the first place... although his secretary, Adrienne Barrett, plays the main protagonist in this, known as The Gamin. All of the characters have names like this, cyphers for their function, such as The Evil One, Mother, Father and, in the case of the actor who actually claims to have directed at least half of it, Bruno VeSota... The Rich Man.

And it’s an interesting film, for sure.There’s not a lot of plot and its a fairly abstract story but it does tell a tale, of sorts... and it certainly holds the attention. Antheil’s score features a prominent wordless voice and it sounds very much like a theremin or ondes martenot, specifically the theremin used in one of the two films this one strongly reminds me of... Spellbound. I can’t help but think that the director, whoever it was, was significantly  influenced by the Salvador Dali dream sequence in this classic Hitchcock movie and also, very much so, by the score by Miklos Rosza. And, the other film it reminds me of is another Dali work, his co-creation with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou. Not just in tone but also in specific moments, such as the importance and focus on a specific severed hand at a couple of points in the narrative (such as it is). 

That story being about a half deranged woman who is living in a world where women seem to be used and abused by men and who ends up killing some specific men... both in her past and during the course of the events which are told as graveyard flashbacks to her childhood. 

A few things of note... firstly two of the actors. Dwarf Angelo Rossitto, who is perhaps best known for his role in Tod Browning’s Freaks but also turns up in films by Al Adamson and the like, plays a newspaper seller... which is a profession he also fell back on in real life between acting jobs, from what I can make out. Another interesting and important name is an uncredited night club patron being played by, of all people, Aaron Spelling. Yep, the same Spelling who would become a giant TV mogul in the 1960s and beyond... and into the mid 2000s... you’ll see his name in lots of credits for shows such as Honey West, Starsky And Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, T J Hooker, Fantasy Island, Hart To Hart, Beverly Hills 90210 and oodles more. 

One last thing... lets talk about the nature of censorship. Anyone watching this now will wonder why a film which has been given a 12 rating by the BBFC was once banned for many decades. Well, it’s interesting because there’s a scene where The Gamin is looking in a mirror and she pulls out a switchblade and, after popping the blade out, looks at it almost lovingly, obviously relishing the lethal potential in the blade while smiling to herself. This attitude, to me, is way more frightening and stronger than any gory death a child might stumble on in, say, a gruesome American slasher movie... but the kind of imagery in those are the things which garner them a stupidly high rating. I think little scenes like this make more of an indelible, psychological impact than any kind of strong graphic imagery so, yeah, you have to wonder just why any censorship other than both self-censorship or parental censorship are allowed to exist. It frightens me that censors can wield such power, especially if they let this movie (which, to be fair, features a severed hand) go out with a 12 rating. Preposterous. 

All in all, though, I would say I really quite liked Dementia and think it would be a good one to programme for an all nighter of dark movies, for sure. I will definitely be watching this one again, at some point. 

Night Tide

 

A-Mora-Therapy

Night Tide
Directed by Curtis Harrington
USA 1961
AIP/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

“Americans have such a simple view of the world.”
Mora, Night Tide

I’ve been wanting to see Night Tide for a little while now. Shot in glorious black and white, the film stars a young Dennis Hopper as sailor Johnny, who visits a coastal town on his weekend leave days. While in a jazz club, he meets the mysterious Mora, played by Linda Lawson, who works in an amusement side show playing a mermaid for a living. It isn’t long before the two start seeing more of each other, as Johnny starts hanging out with her and the beachside community in town, where she lives in an apartment above the Merry-Go-Round. However, the occasional fleeting presence of a mysterious Greek woman who frightens Mora... and the discovery that both of Mora’s previous boyfriends drowned at the full moon, leads him to fear for both his life and Mora’s, as he tries to understand the mysterious woman with whom he’s fallen in love. 

Okay, so with the inclusion of the mysterious, intimidating woman played by Marjorie Cameron, we basically have a vibe from this movie which gives it the feel of a watery remake of Val Lewton’s Cat People from 19 years earlier. Which is pretty much what it is with a possible difference, depending on how you personally decode the story beats. 

The film is almost a psychological drama with Mora pictured as actually being a real mermaid, with the Greek woman representing her fellow, siren-like fish people who are calling her to return to the sea during the full moon. There’s quite a lot of silence and pausing in terms of the dialogue of the movie and it’s really obvious to see, even from this early point into his career, that Hopper is actually a really great actor. Giving the part lots of expression and attitude (especially of naivete or innocence), he fleshes out the character with a lot of depth, as you can see him carefully considering everything in his head before he speaks... I’ve never had an awful lot of time for Hopper as an actor, to be honest but, this film really hits home just how good he was. 

Equally great is the confused and troubled Mora, with Lawson really going to town on the mysterious woman and her unusual attraction to the sea (especially when the moon is full). She perfectly compliments Hopper’s strangely sympathetic performance by giving him a cypher to play off of... as her character shifts between mental states to frighten Johnny as much as she mesmerises him, in her seduction of the character.

There is a slight difference between the basic idea holding both Cat People and Night Tide together in terms of story... in that there is a full on explanation here for what is troubling the main female protagonist. But where Cat People veers right into a very specific conclusion at the film’s end, Night Tide maintains the ambiguity and it’s not until things have gone horribly wrong, by the end of the picture, that the film allows a feint hint that the writer is both trying to have his cake and eat it, where this specific movie is concerned. It’s only at the end, where the dry ‘scientific explanation meets Scooby Doo’ is undercut by the fact that nobody can explain the Greek woman who has been appearing to Mora and Johnny throughout the film, that doubt is once more cast as to the true legacy of Mora’s character.

The film is moodily shot with a lot of slightly off-kilter, fun house style camera angles (from a Dutch fun house, obviously) which give it an almost Caligari-like feel in some places but, it also gives off an aura not unlike a certain film which came out a year after this one was made (although released later in some territories) which I also believe it shares some common DNA with... that being Herk Hervey’s Carnival Of Souls. Although the incessantly eerie pipe organ music of that later work is instead filled in with a more traditional score by famous Hollywood composer David Raksin, which sometimes hits the mark and, other times, undercuts it in a negative manner, it seems to me. However, the enigmatic mood is kept throughout and the score doesn’t relly harm it in most places. 

The film reaches a kind of unsatisfactory conclusion by the end of the picture, it has to be said but, it’s honestly a fun journey getting there. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Night Tide as an ambiguous thriller which strays into horror territory and, I think the film should perhaps be a little better known than it currently is. The Blu Ray from Indicator has the usual ‘let’s push the boat out’ flurry of extras which, I’m sure are very good but which I haven’t had the opportunity to sample myself, as yet. But I’m really glad they put this one out and I’m happy to have seen it. 

The Inspector Wears Skirts 3 - Raid on Royal Casino Marine

A Skirtful Of Dollars

The Inspector Wears Skirts 3 - 
Raid on Royal Casino Marine
aka Huang jia du chuan
Hong Kong 1990 Directed by Wellson Chin 
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilerage, if such a thing is possible with this broad kind of comedy vehicle.

The Inspector Wears Skirts 3 - Raid on Royal Casino Marine is the third of the films in the popular series, although I was dreading watching the third after the appallingly bad second installment. It’s also the only one in the series not produced by Golden Harvest... which is apparently why Golden Harvest don’t allow the film to be packaged together with any of their SKIRTS movies in a box set, although this has many of the same characters and actors from the previous two films. 

Okay, so after Inspector Kan, played once again by Stanley Sui-Fan Fung, loses a bunch of police weapons (including an atomic bomb somehow) to a gang of criminals, the police have gotten wind that a gambling shop which will be hosting four crime bosses may have something to do with the heist. So in this one, he’s told to reform and retrain the SKIRTS unit, once trained up by Madame Wu. After their quick fire romance in the last movie, Madame Wu, played once again by the fantastic Sibelle Hu, is now retired and married to Kan. She has a few scenes with him near the start and, when things go wrong for everyone at the end of the film, she parachutes in to save the day and take back the gambling ship.

Anyway, the SKIRTS are reformed with a few of them returning from the previous films, including superstar Sandra Kwan Yue Ng as Amy, the funny one... providing comedy relief to a film which is nothing but comedy relief. And, yeah, it’s a mess of a movie again, just like the second one. There’s little action and the comedy is just so obvious and crude it’s hard to watch, quite often. It actually had me fooled for a while because the first ten minutes are pretty good but, yeah, when it comes to the Police Academy style training routines and various jokes about body odour, large breasts and a somewhat misogynistic attitude from the various male characters... it’s no fun. 

Things get a little better in the second half of the film, when the girls and the inspector go undercover on the gambling ship but, not that much better, it has to be said. I think it takes a special kind of dimmed down sense of humour to appreciate these films and, sadly, it’s not sparking much appreciation from me. 

There’s some ridiculous stuff too, bordering on surrealism. For instance, a VHS cassette of the notorious movie The Men Behind The Sun (a film I’ve never been curious to see due to its disturbing nature... also, I don’t want to see a bunch of rats eating a live cat for real, thanks) ushers in a scene where the inspector is electrocuting the girls to find out some completely inane and trivial piece of information. When the gals get their revenge, they drug him and make him believe he’s in various horror movies... with girls dressed up as the likes of Jason from the Friday The 13th films and Freddy Krueger from The Nightmare On Elm Street films but, trust me, it sounds better than it is. 

One scene which does have promise is when Amy and the man she falls for are having a heart to heart on the deck of the boat and a violin player comes along to add atmosphere... but it’s kinda thrown away and not really played with to make it funny... which, given the propensity of this film series to milk every joke to death, surprised me somewhat. 

And, yeah, another short review but, asides from a cast of actors who are actually all very good and playing it for all they’re worth and, despite the terrible script, then I think that’s me done with The Inspector Wears Skirts 3 - Raid on Royal Casino Marine... it’s not a film I can, in all conscience, recommend to anyone, I’m afraid. Just one more of these left to watch now... I’ll let you know how it goes. 

The Land That Time Forgot

The Lost Whirled

The Land That Time Forgot
Directed by Kevin Connor
UK/USA 1975
Amicus
Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Ending spoilers.

The Land That Time Forgot is the first of two movies based on a trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, the two sequel books being The People That Time Forgot (also made into a movie) and Out Of Time’s Abyss.

One of the co-writers of the screenplay is Michael Moorcock, perhaps best known for his various multiverse novels about different aspects of The Eternal Champion, such as Elric Of Melnibone, Dorian Hawkmoon and Jerry Cornelius. Which perhaps comes as no surprise because, if memory serves, he was once an active member of the British Edgar Rice Burroughs Society. Of this film he has apparently gone on record in saying that the last 20 minutes of the film deviates wildly from the novel, due to interference by the studio.

The film stars Doug McClure as Burroughs’ hero Bowen Tyler and is set contemporaneously to when the book was written during the First World War (I believe). This one starts off when a German Submarine…  commanded by officers played by the likes of John McEnery and the future reincarnation of The Master in Doctor Who himself, Anthony Ainley… sinks a ship carrying Tyler, his love interest played by Susan Penhaligon, the ship’s Captain played by Keith Barron and a few other of a handful of survivors, who temporarily manage to take command of the U-Boat themselves for a short while.

Various shenanigans and power plays ensue until the two crews pitch up on an island populated by various dinosaurs and cavemen, representing different areas of the island in a strange set of boundaries representing, even on the life at a microbial level, different time periods in Earth’s history. At which point the two surviving sets of crew members start to work together to find a way out of the vicinity of the island as soon as possible.

I remember missing this film at the cinema when I was a kid so, when I saw the sequel a couple of years later, I was a bit confused when Doug McClure’s character suddenly turns up halfway through the film. I must have seen this film at some point in the 1980s but didn’t remember much about it when I finally got around to watching Imprint’s lovely new edition in a box set with three other similar films featuring McClure from this period. A quick shout out to anybody else who bought this Tales Of Adventure Collection 9 set within the first six months or so… the original disc of this film issued in this set has a bad VHS master of a truncated TV print which looks absolutely terrible. You will need to talk to Imprint who have now repressed the disc with the correct print and transfer on it.

Now, I was expecting the effects in this film to look absolutely appalling now but, Amicus were spending their biggest ever budget at this point and they had Derek Meddings on board as their secret weapon. So obviously the miniatures look terrific and the puppet dinosaurs look, mostly, pretty good. Now I’m not saying, as my mum did when we watched this one together, that the effects are better than Jurassic Park but, they’re not bad either and certainly not as bad as later films in this cycle. Although the first shot of the pterodactyls, three of them flying in a circle, did look a little bit like an infant’s mobile hanging above the bed.

That being said, I was genuinely impressed by the illusion created by the camera work and the editing to and from the dinosaurs and was especially impressed by the social commentary in the movie, such as when a dying styracosaurus is filmed in close up and a tear is seen falling from its eye.

And then we get to the ending of the film, which would have driven me mad if I’d seen it in the cinema when it opened. Almost the entire crew leaves in the sub, which gets destroyed in a, possibly sentient, volcano... killing them all. Only Doug McClure and Susan Penhaligon are left surviving, stranded on the island in 1916, tossing the flask carrying the narration for the movie we’ve just seen inside of it.

So Amicus presumably had their eye on the sequel, at least. A sequel I remember as not being nearly as good as this movie. But, I have to say, I really enjoyed this one, The Land That Time Forgot, more than I have than at any other time I’ve watched it and I have to give credit to Australian label Imprint for being the only game in town to date where I can actually pick up a copy of this British/American co-production on blu ray. So well done to them.

The New Avengers

Purdey Hair

The New Avengers
ITV 1976-77
Two series
26 episodes
Studio Canal Blu Ray Box 

When I was around four or five years old, in the very early 1970s, I used to watch repeats of The Avengers on TV and I remember liking it a lot. I saw the Honor Blackman episodes (indeed, I must have seen many of the episodes I suspect are now no longer with us from the first season), the Diana Rigg episodes and the Linda Thorson episodes... and I believe some of my earliest name fictional character recognitions were Kathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King*… along with other usual suspects like Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, Doctor Who and Scott Tracy.

And of course there was the solid rock of a character in every episode, the male lead in pretty much every incarnation of The Avengers... John Steed, with his bowler hat and umbrella. Played, as always, by the great Patrick Macnee.

So it was with no small amount of excitement when the 8 year old version of myself received the news that a brand new series of The Avengers, entitled rather practically as The New Avengers, would be on my TV screen soon.

It was on fairly late on a Saturday or Sunday evening, if I’m recalling correctly… and we sat down to watch the first episode, The Eagles Nest, about a group of modern nazis who has been keeping Hitler’s body on ice all these years, until medical science was able to resuscitate him. And I have to say, it was pretty good stuff. We all loved it as a family and it even had Peter Cushing in the episode, as the scientist the new nazis kidnapped to get the job done right.

Now, not long after the show had started, my mother and I were run over by two cars which hit each other before mounting the pavement, out of control, and clobbering us. Since my jaw bone from my ‘against all odds’ still attached head couldn’t be wired back in the normal way, I had to take a few years off school to allow it to heal itself. Every cloud has a silver lining I guess but the problem was, I was stuck in hospital for the first week or two and the nurses on the children’s ward wouldn’t let me stay up with the television on to watch The New Avengers. Which I was very concerned about at the time. Although I did have the special souvenir magazine put out by TV Times to comfort me at some point, which was pretty thick and covered a lot of the show (and predecessors)… an issue which I’m pleased to say I still have to this day.

So, alas, I didn’t see a fair few of the episodes on its original run, which makes me happy to be finally catching up with them again after all these years, in a new Blu Ray set put out by Studio Canal, which looks good but is way too expensive for what is, after all, just 26 episodes.

And I watched these all recently with my mum and it’s still great. Patrick Macnee was still charming as Steed and his two new, supporting Avengers, Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit and Joanna Lumley as the amazing Purdey (shortly before she would amaze us all again by taking on one of the title roles in Sapphire And Steel), are brilliant.

Some of the episodes… and this is no surprise since the show was using the same writers and producers of the bulk of the original incarnation… are able to capture the surreal and fun spirit of the originals and, others are a bit more humdrum but, even so, the chemistry between the three leads and the dialogue writing for them, was absolutely brilliant and I was a little surprised that these whimsical ‘to and fros’ between the characters still hold up today.

For instance, when Purdey pulls her bra off to give to Mike to use as a slingshot to get them out of a jam, he says “Why didn’t you burn it with all the other ladies?” To which she replies, “I didn’t need to. I already knew I was liberated.”

There were guest directors as well, such as Robert Feust, who you may remember directed The Final Programme (reviewed by me here). And, of course, many actors and actresses who would suddenly turn up for an episode (because who wouldn’t want to be in The Avengers) such as Jenny Runacre, Jon Finch, Ronald Lacey, Deep Roy and even the great Caroline Munro.

They even have a bit of a reunion, with Ian Hendry returning for an episode, although not as the co-starring lead character he played alongside Macnee in the early years of the show. Not to mention an episode where the two bad guys are played by Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins, who would bring exactly the same chemistry they had here to the producer’s next TV show, The Professionals.

Not only that, the set includes the last four episodes, shot and produced in Canada, proudly proclaiming before the pre-credits sequence that it’s The New Avengers in Canada, before going onto the usual action sequence which would then freeze at the crucial part... followed by the wonderful animated credits sequence that came in from about halfway through the first season… and then going back to the freeze frame and concluding the opening scene. As was the format of all the episodes.

And of course, all the music, including the wonderful new opening title music which cunningly utilises his old baseline from the original show in a new way, is by the original show composer Laurie Johnson, who came on in the early days of the show after original composer Johnny Dankworth left. The show is filled with good music including a few sly nods to Johnson’s mentor, composer Bernard Herrmann.

And with episodes dedicated to such antagonists as killer birds, a giant rat in the sewers and a homicidal building… it’s just a fun packed snapshot of what late 1970s TV could be. The New Avengers makes for a nice, if prohibitively expensive slice of TV heaven that audiences of a certain age should surely enjoy and a worthy successor to the original show. Go on, give it a go.

*I’m not forgetting Avenger girls Ingrid Hafner as Carol Wilson and Julie Stevens as Venus Smith... but that’s for another review (coming to a blog near you, sometime late 2026 or early 2027).

Now You See Me, Now You Don't

Augmented Unreality

Now You See Me, 
Now You Don't
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
USA/United Arab Emirates/
Canada/Hungary 2025 
Lionsgate Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some light spoilers.

Okay, so this third installment in the wonderful Now You See Me franchise feels a bit like a too little, too late kind of scenario, to be perfectly honest. And I can straight away say that I can understand why it’s not as well loved as the other two movies... frankly, it is the worst written of the three. But at least it finally has the title Now You See Me, Now You Don't... which is what we all wanted as the title for the second film.

But, that being said, the director manages to keep the ball rolling through most of the presentation and it never once gets dull. Clichéd and disappointing in places perhaps... but never dull.

Okay, so this is set around ten years since the last show staged by ‘The Four Horsemen’ and there’s an opening sequence where the four are back and performing for a crowd, using their stage act to rob from the criminally gained rich and give to the poor, once more. And here was my first disappointment... it felt a little off to me. And so I was pretty unsurprised by the first twist of the movie, that this was an AI representation of the horsemen being utilised to cash in on them (and seek an entrance) by a new group of three young magicians. 

So returning we have the original four horsemen played by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher... we have the new three played by Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt and the always watchable Justice Smith. We also have Morgan Freeman returning and in a somewhat awful cameo at the end of the picture, Mark Ruffalo (who is sorely missed as a player in this). All coming together to foil the daughter of a nazi empire and her dirty diamonds, played by Rosamund Pike. 

Not to mention my favourite return guest... Lizzy Caplan... as the returning ‘other girl horseman’ Lula!

And it’s... kinda fun but, honestly, tips it’s hat one too many times, so to speak and... I don’t know... I can handle that the magic is somewhat faked in a lot of the scenes and there’s even a clever piece of sleight of hand played on the audience when Ariana Greenblatt escapes her captors due to a simple camera movement... but it’s not enough to make up for the somewhat hum drum story, I thought. 

I do have a couple of criticisms of the movie. Now, Isla Fisher’s character is really happy to see Morgan Freeman’s returning Thaddeus, even though in terms of the story, she has already left The Horseman by the time he turns out not to have been the villain after all (at the end of the second movie). So, yeah, considering the fact that nobody has really been keeping tabs on each other in the group (and despite the reason for them splitting being absolutely lacking in credibility)... she really shouldn’t have ben that happy to see what, to her, should have looked like a returning villain. 

Also, my other problem, is that for four people who are fugitives from the law at the end of the previous two movies... how are they able to hold a job down in every day life (Dave Franco’s character is a cruise ship magician, for example) without being picked up by the FBI or the police? It makes absolutely no sense people!

The one thing the film does, kinda, have going for it is the twist with the revelation of the identity of one of the characters at the end game of the film. This actually surprised me but... also disappointed me because it seemed so contrived and somewhat anticlimactic. It just all felt a little off and... meh. Even the Escher-like chase scene in a chateau seemed somewhat less than it should have been.

So Now You See Me Now You Don’t is not a dull film and I had some fun with it, especially as it’s once again all tied up with one of franchise composer Brian Tyler’s masterful scores (although, c’mon man, we need a proper CD release of the first and third film scores please). But that’s me done with it... the young cast are, mostly, not as irritating as they could be but I would have preferred the film without them in order to have more time with The Horsemen from the first two films. Not great but not terrible either.

Undertone

Pod Fearing People

Undertone
Directed by Ian Tuason
Canada 2026
Vertigo Releasing
UK Cinema Release Print

Finally got to the cinema again (the last six months have been very hard) and about the only movie that could coax me out was one in which I knew the sound design would play a huge part. And, yeah, sound design is everything to Undertone, so I think I made the right call here.

So in terms of actual physical appearances by actors, this is a two hander, all set in one house, with lead actress Nina Kiri as supernatural phenomena debunker/podcaster Eva and Michèle Duquet as her silent, dying in bed mum. All the rest of the cast, including Adam DiMarco as her fellow podcast hoster Justin, are all voices playing out on her headphone receiver.

And, suspending disbelief about how podcasts which are being recorded for future airing can have live callers at random recording times, the film has a pretty claustrophobic atmosphere as Eva and Justin, over a space of a few recording sessions, work their way through listening to a series of ten anonymously emailed sound files concerning a young, ‘expecting’ couple during the night. Starting off with the husband recording these to initially capture his wife talking in her sleep.

That’s as far as I’ll go on the story content other than to make the comment that the initial set up obviously shares some DNA with the fantastic movie Monolith (reviewed here), which I saw play at FrightFest a couple of years ago. And, even more so in the case of Undertone, the action never once leaves the confines of Eva’s mother’s house. Eva leaves once but, yeah, the camera stays behind.

Now, I’m a sucker for these very small cast, single location pieces and, I have to say, this slow builds to being one of the most terrifying I’ve seen in recent years. Perhaps for the wrong reasons by the end of the movie but it’s all down to two things, asides from where the ideas thrown up by the recordings goes.

The first of these two is the wonderful performance by Nina Kiri. Apart from when she’s talking on her side of the podcast, it’s a solid silent performance which relies a lot on the reactive expressions Kiri brings to the table here, both to what she’s listening to but also to what’s going on in the house as she keeps an eye on her dying mother.

But the equal star of the show here is the aforementioned sound design. The films does have a deftly, light handed score on it but it’s the mix of sounds giving audio sensations of both what’s on the recordings and, again, simultaneously in the house... which makes or breaks this thing. And it’s well done here.

So well done in fact that, while I was perhaps disappointed by the obvious style of the conclusion the film has, my heart was still beating fast in my chest due to the absolute unremitting cacophony of the foley track.

So yeah, my final thoughts on Undertone is that it’s a very well performed and mostly well crafted slice of horror which, ultimately doesn’t allow for too many surprises by the end of the film but, makes up for it in sheer energy and artistic determination. Good for a scare and certainly one to partner up with the aforementioned Monolith as a nice ‘mates round for drinks’ double bill or even the third or fourth film in an all nighter (it certainly gets way too loud to sleep through).

China O' Brien 2

China Town Syndrome

China O' Brien 2
aka China O’ Brien II
Directed by Robert Clouse
USA 1990 
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, I have to confess that, after seeing the quite good previous movie in this series (reviewed by me here) and having watched a fair few of Cynthia Rothrock’s great Hong Kong movies in a short period of time before this, I was kinda disappointed in China O’ Brien 2. 

As we know from Cynthia’s interview on the other disc in Eureka’s two disc presentation of these films, this was filmed simultaneously with the previous film and the actors were often hard pressed to work out which film they were shooting at any given time. And in this one it kinda shows, it has to be said. 

The almighty Rothrock as China, now Sheriff of the town she arrived at in the first movie, is joined once again by her ‘deputies’, the charismatic Richard Norton as Matt Conroy and Keith Cooke as Dakota, plus a load of other actors from the earlier film. Now, I’m not sure if the guy writing the plot synopsis has actually seen the film... because it doesn’t bear too much resemblance to what actually happens in the movie... but this one’s about Vietnam vet smuggler Charlie Baskin (played by Harlow Marks) escaping from prison and putting the people who put him there six feet under. Culminating in repossessing the money from the one who turned states evidence against him and who was relocated by the FBI, along with his wife and daughter, to the sleepy town which China and crew are watching over. 

And it really feels as rushed as it evidently was, to be honest... more so than the first movie. For a start, there’s not enough fight scenes to keep the pacing going and there’s even a flashback to a fight scene in the first movie (almost like a bottle neck episode of a TV show). It just feels like a bit of a letdown compared to Rothrock and Norton’s back catalogue. Also, now knowing that the fights were rushed and choreographed on the hoof, explains why there’s one bit where a chair seems to connect with Norton’s face in a scene but there’s no sound of it hitting (though the actor certainly reacts) and then he straightens up and keeps swinging. I suspect it was supposed to miss him and still look like it missed him and, they just went on ahead and kept filming and didn’t bother with a retake or dubbing it to make the actual visual work. But I suspect Norton got hurt on that one. 

And talking about lack of sound, the lip synch in one scene of the FBI relocated daughter tied up in the car takes a full couple of seconds to catch up with her mouth, which starts moving way before. And then, seconds later, one of the bad guys shouts through a car window at her... except no sound comes out of his mouth whatsoever. What’s going on?

The continuity on this one is atrocious too. Lots of things wrong but I have two favourites. Firstly, Rothrock said on the interview it was mostly the same stunt fighters being redressed as different people constantly throughout the movie. Well I would have thought they would have drawn the line at one point because there’s a scene where she’s fighting one of the ‘thugs for hire’ and it’s clearly the same actor who played one of the lead villains in the first film. I mean, c’mon, the sheriff didn’t notice this guy? 

Secondly... and this is my favourite... one distinctive looking guy gets shot to death by one of the sherif’s men with absolutely no room to maneuver on that, we see the spray of machine gun fire popping up as blood all over his chest. And then, not a minute or two after this, here he is up in his original, non-bloody costume and helping out again... even becoming a major player in the final fight sequences of the movie. I mean, what were they thinking?

But, yeah, I do quite like Cynthia Rothrock and she has good chemistry with Norton. It’s a shame the proposed next two parts never came to fruition but it’s still, relatively speaking, an entertaining product. I’d liken it to what Republic Studios might have made if they were still active and making serials in the late 1980s (which was when the China O’Brien movies were shot... they had delayed, straight to VHS rental releases... and were doing good business at the time). So, yeah, I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to finally catch up with China O’ Brien 2 and I hope Eureka and 88 Films continue to release more of Rothrock’s back catalogue.  I’m up for it.

Absurd

Eastman Colour

Absurd
aka The Grim Reaper
aka Rosso Sangue 
Directed by Joe D’Amato
Italy 1981
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers drilling into your noggin.

So after Anthropophagus (reviewed here) was, presumably, relatively successful, albeit being a banned film in the UK for many years due to being on the famous ‘Video Nasties list’, they tried to bandwagon that earlier film, somewhat, the very next year with Rosso Sangue, best known in the UK, where it was also banned for the same reason for many years, as Absurd.

Okay, so despite people often calling this a sideways sequel or follow up to the earlier film, Anthropophagus shares no characters with that first one and, although George Eastman plays the Greek antagonist of the movie, he is not a Greek cannibal. Instead, he’s the accidental creation of a ‘science priest’ played by Edmund Purdom of all people. Purdom has a very fake sounding Greek accent and many other people in this have extraordinary fake sounding Irish accents too, which leads me to believe the film is set in the relatively isolated Irish countryside, even though I did spot a red fire hydrant on the road in one shot (is this a thing in Ireland... really?). 

So Mikos Stenopolis, the character Eastman plays, is a man who just walks around looming at people and killing them... in mostly not so interesting ways... for absolutely no reason. We see him trying to get over a spiky fence and get into a house but he’s injured, with the help of Purdom, who we at first think is the villain of the piece. So do the police because, while the unconscious Eastman, with his insides hanging out (presumably a little nod to the end scene in Anthropophagus) is taken to hospital, Purdom is eventually held as a suspect in whatever funny business is perceived. 

Meanwhile, we have the story of a family going out for the evening to a friend’s house to watch an American football game and leaving their completely ‘bed bound and in traction for a spine injury’ daughter, in her early teens, plus her even younger brother, with a baby sitter. The sitter has instructions not to go home until the other baby sitter, who works at the same hospital where Eastman’s character was admitted, arrives to give the daughter her physiotherapy and carry on babysitting. 

However, it transpires that Purdom’s scientific experimentation has, while admittedly given Eastman superhuman recovery properties, also turned him into the mindless killing machine he has become and he harbours the seeds of evil in his brain. The police think Purdom may be telling the truth after all, when Eastman completely recovers from having his guts hanging out earlier in the day and, after putting a drill through a nurses head, escapes into the countryside to do more killing, as he heads towards the house from earlier, where the babysitter and kiddies await. 

After this it’s all, bandsaw through the head, pick axe through the brain kinds of shenanigans until it’s just the physiotherapist, played by Annie Belle (who you may remember from Lips Of Blood, reviewed here, although it’s evident here that no director other than Jean Rollin could make her look as good as she did in that movie) and the two kids, trying to stay safe in the house with Eastman on the loose and lurking everyone to death. One impressive, simply done but surprisingly good looking effect (essentially from Belle’s performance) is when he forces her head into an oven and slow cooks it, the camera crosscutting with other things and each time it returns, a new level of burn make up is applied to the actress’ head. 

And it’s, like Anthropophagus, a film which involves a fair amount of sneaking about and acting quiet and cautious in big interior spaces... yeah, they’re definitely trying to mine the same vein here. And to be fair, it has a lot going for it. 

Firstly, it’s technically better than Anthropophagus, with some nicely designed camera shots and less reliance on the handheld camera technique... which only crops up when it’s appropriate that it does so. And the actors are all, arguably, pretty good in their roles... fake accents aside. Katya Berger, who plays the mostly bed bound little girl (until the end when she becomes a monster in order to defeat the monster and is landed with that riff) is especially good in this, I thought. Not only that but, the score by Carlo Maria Cordio (which was released by Cinevox before a more expanded version by Beat Records was released on CD) is actually much better than the former film and sounds just like an Italian horror film ought to (which is not that many steps away from what Goblin or Fabio Frizzi might have done with it) and so it works very well here. 

So, good acting, quite good direction and good cinematography, good music... Absurd is so much better made than Anthropophagus. Why, then, did I much prefer the earlier film, which wasn’t really proficient in any of these areas, way more than I did this one? All I can say is the simplicity of the plot of the former movie maybe had more charm to it than this one but, even though Absurd is the more accomplished movie by far, I’m much more likely to rewatch Anthropophagus some day than return to this one, in all honesty. And, other than saying it’s absolutely ridiculous for a policeman to lend a priest, who he thought only a minute before was a villain, a firearm and then tell him they’ll both independently hunt Eastman... well... that’s me about done with this movie, I think. It was an okay time but not a great or even good one and I can’t say I’d recommend this one to anybody, alas. 

In The Navy

Navy Lark Ascending

In The Navy
Directed by Arthur Lubin
USA 1941
Universal Pictures
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Abbott and Costello were so popular already that they released four movies in 1941 alone and this one, In The Navy, was the second of them. This one stars the famous singing star Dick Powell as the main romantic lead (three years before he tried to change his image by playing a pretty good version of Philip Marlow, if memory serves, in Murder My Sweet aka Farewell My Lovely), Claire Dodd as his romantic interest (who played Della Street in the Perry Mason flick The Case Of The Velvet Claws, reviewed here) and, also as a kind of semi-villainous authority figure role, Dick Foran (this film sandwiched between, among others, his two The Mummy sequels The Mummy’s Hand, reviewed here and The Mummy’s Tomb, reviewed here). 

While it’s a case of Bud and Lou being punctuated by the intrusive ‘reporter tries to break the story of the singing sensation who joins the Navy incognito to escape his adoring, female public before falling in love with him’ plot, along with various musical outbursts, most of which didn’t land for me this time, apart from the wonderful Andrews Sisters numbers in the movie, they don’t take a back seat as much... but, I have to say, I didn’t like this one as much as the previous two movies, for sure. Which just shows how much I know because, the general public liked it fine and the picture raked in even more box office bullion than their previous picture Buck Privates (reviewed here). This wasn’t a direct sequel to that movie, with the boys playing different characters but, there was one coming for sure. Actually, they already had the next picture in the can before this but, because the American public wanted more ‘service pictures’, the Navy movie was released first.

And, although I didn’t find it quite as entertaining, there’s still a lot of nice comedy moments in this and some points of interest too. The routines they do, a couple of them aided by Shemp Howard of The Three Stooges again, are mostly okay but they are still quite amusing and there’s one extended sequence involving spitting water at each other where the guys (and everyone else on set) keep cracking up and spilling the water, with all those takes left in. There are some nice dialogue moments too... for instance, when the lead actress stowing away introduces herself to Lou as Dot and when Lou sees someone coming for her, he yells “Dash, Dot! Dash!” Which made me smile. Also, when Lou asks Bud what some men are working on in a photo, Bud replies ‘That’s a hull of a ship!” Lou says, “You’re telling me. But what’s that thing they’re working on!” Or when Lou is reading about what Stern, Bow and Starboard is and Dot asks him where the Port is, he directs her that it’s near the ice box. 

So yeah, there’s some good dialogue and also some nice visual comedy, such as the moment Lou draws a big hook on a blackboard and then hangs his hat on it like it’s a real one. But there’s also some interesting metatextual stuff going on in the movie too, such as the opening credits where Bud and Lou are hoisting flags up with the names and titles on them and they flag up that it’s Buck Privates, before Bud points out that Lou got the wrong flag and they hoist it back up as In The Navy. And another scene where Lou says he’s going to go out and buy loads of Andrews Sisters records and starts singing one of the songs from the previous film... which is almost fine because the Andrews Sisters are kinda playing versions of themselves in this one but... yeah, it’s still kinda hammering lightly at that fourth wall, for sure. 

The most curious thing, for me, was a whole extended 15 or 20 minute sequence near the end of the movie where Lou accidentally gains control of the ship and sends it on some bizarre military manoeuvres (courtesy of some not too convincing miniatures, it has to be said)... which then suddenly turns out to be part of a dream after he knocks himself out with a sleeping draft. Well, I thought this was a pretty strange choice for the movie, being as it’s right near the end but, reading up on it, it was never originally supposed to be a dream sequence. What happened was, when the Navy saw the crazy movements the ship was making in this big sequence, they immediately withdrew their support for the film... so the studio changed it to being a dream sequence and then they were back ‘on board’ with the film, if you’ll excuse the pun (and why wouldn’t you?). 

And that’s me done on In The Navy, I think. Again, I didn’t like this one as much as the other two but it’s still quite entertaining for the most part and I’m still looking forward to seeing the other 20 plus movies in Shout Factory’s well restored Blu Ray box. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Henry And June

Where Hearts Were 
Entertained In June

Henry & June
Directed by Phillip Kaufman
USA/France 1990
Universal
Blu Ray Zone B

Wow, it says something when I have to import a big American movie on Blu Ray from Italy because there are no UK or US versions of the film made in that format. Hollywoodland needs to catch up with what people want, I think. 

A couple of years after one of his many masterpieces, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Phillip Kaufman co-wrote and directed another movie heavily tinged with the erotic experience, namely Henry & June. I remember going to the cinema to see this one at the time with my best friend. Sadly, neither the cinema or my friend still exist but this movie does bring back some memories of both for me. 

The film was somewhat star studded, for the time, with the titular writer Henry Miller being played by Fred Ward (Remo Williams aka The Destroyer himself, ladies and gentleman) and with his somewhat challenging wife June being played by the rising star Uma Thurman. Then, of course, there’s the central character of the film, who we see everything through the eyes of, the great female erotica writer Anaïs Nin, played by the always compelling Maria de Medeiros. And she is the real star of the show here, as the movie is based on her diaries, published posthumously after the last surviving person who appears in them, her husband Hugo, had died. Hugo here is played by a young Richard E. Grant and, yeah, his fake American accent in this movie does, it has to be said, take some getting used to. And Kevin Spacey looks so young in this one. 

The film takes place in Paris in the early 1930s, starting off with a flashback to 1931 as we find Anaïs coming across a stash of pornographic photos and illustrations she finds after her husband and she have rented an apartment there. The two seconds or less shot of one drawing depicting Japanese tentacle porn is apparently what ensured the film was the first ever to get an NC-17 release in America. Go figure!?!?!

And then, while concentrating on her writing, a struggling Henry Miller, working on his famous book Tropic Of Cancer, walks into her life and she gets sucked into the whirlpool of ‘the decadent artist life’ in Paris at the time... falling in love with both Henry and June while also continuing loving, sexual encounters with her husband. I won’t say much more about the story content because, it’s based on diaries and so in terms of a through line... well there is one but it’s more a series of episodic, impressions of the time. And perhaps better for it.

And when I say it’s impressionistic, I mean just that. As you would expect from a Kaufman film, the director makes best use of his cinematographer Philippe Rousselot to literally paint a picture of the times, often harking back to those famous photographic shots of Paris and its nightlife that you would remember, some of which are one display in the film. The muted colours in certain compositions setting off visual memories in the mind of the watcher (at least it did to me) which often mirror those scenes of the Parisian night life which oft times spark the imagination. Indeed, there’s one scene where it becomes more blatantly channelled, as Anaïs and Henry are hanging around Brassaï (played here by Artus de Penguern) as he takes various shots which, I’m pretty sure, are used in their original form at each flash of the camera. 

The film is deeply erotic but holds back in many scenes of graphic ostentation (apart from standard nudity and the beauty of the female form without too much close up detail) while actually managing to be erotic more in its enthusiasm for the voracious appetites of human sexuality with an emphasis on the positivity of the experience more than anything else. The film starts off almost subconsciously foreshadowing the maelstrom that Anaïs’ life is about to explode into by using the opening bars of The Adoration Of The Earth from Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring and, I guess if you are familiar with the piece (which I wouldn’t have been when I went to see this in 1990) then you might get an idea of the emotional turmoil that the main characters will soon be going through. A piece by Eric Satie is used later, which of course lends it own mood to the way the images are percieved. 

My favourite two scenes of the movie are as follows. One where Henry and Anaïs are in a cinema watching Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (which I guess is a bit of artistic licence because the film was already a couple of years old when this film is set) and Anaïs is vocally defending it against the rowdy audience criticising it for being obscene. 

And the other one is a scene in a brothel where Anaïs and Hugo hire two women to make love to each other so they can watch. It’s a nicely rendered sex scene featuring a cameo role from the great Brigitte Lahaie (again, another actress who I wouldn’t have been familiar with when I first saw this film) and it’s a stand out moment when, half way through, Anaïs tells Brigitte to stop pretending to be a man (in order to properly see how one woman makes love to another). 

So, yeah, Henry & June is a wonderfully performed, well designed movie featuring an exploration and juxtaposition of fleshy textures and warm (and sometimes muted) colours which make for a beautiful and, sometimes, hypnagogic piece of cinematic art. I think it’s a film which has been largely forgotten in the US (and UK) and I think it deserves to be remembered and celebrated with a bells and whistles Blu Ray and UHD release at some point soon. Another triumph for Kaufman and the, probably, liberating poetic sexuality of Anaïs Nin.